


Forgotten

by JulyStorms



Series: First Kisses [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 21:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4760837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JulyStorms/pseuds/JulyStorms
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hange and Erwin's first kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> This ‘fic is part of my ‘First Kisses’ series, which, unsurprisingly, is a compilation of 'fics about characters and their first kiss.

Four people are dead, and it’s only the first day. He tries to remember the weight of four dead soldiers and can’t. His fingers twist idly around the quill in his hand before he dips it in the inkwell. Practiced ease. Everything has become too easy, and in becoming too easy, it has also become too hard.

They have one and a half bodies for four dead people.

As a human being, he should be more affected.

He should feel _something_ —something more than the stirrings of unease as he taps the loose ink free and prepares to commit the names of the dead to permanent record.

When he was a child, he had once worried for the life of a sparrow he’d found fallen in the street behind the schoolhouse where his father taught. There was worry, then, and fear, and a flashing, sharp sadness as the small, quivering bird stilled in the palm of his hand.

He isn’t sure that he can feel like that anymore.

Maybe he’s forgotten how.

What is the weight of four dead uniformed soldiers when compared to hundreds? Hundreds of thousands?

Erwin is surprised to realize that he doesn’t know the names. He looks up, through the flickering candleflame at the darkness in front of him, and watches Hange. She’s squinting in the semi-darkness, studying a map: always studying, always working hard.

She wants everyone to feel safe, but to achieve that goal she has to allow some people to not feel safe—to die, even. He wonders how it hurts her deep down where she won’t let anyone go, not even her closest friends.

“Hange,” he says.

She looks up, almost as if she expected this, and maybe she did. “Hm?”

“The names.” He breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth. “Of the men who died today.”

She purses her lips, tilts her head back to stretch the muscles in her neck, sore from leaning over the makeshift table for hours, but she comes to him—stands close enough that the gentle swell of her hip brushes his shoulder. She looks down, squints again to read his pathetic attempt at recalling the names of his own men, and shakes her head.

“You’re tired,” she tells him—excuses him, as if sleepiness or exhaustion is a good reason to forget the names of four good soldiers. Four soldiers whose lives were sacrificed for a goal.

He really should make an effort to remember them.

To remember them all. As Hange does: names and faces and the number of the expedition that took them away.

He thinks, now, in terms of numbers. Eleven new recruits joined the Survey Corps in early May. It’s July, now, and four of them are dead on the first day of a two-week long expedition. He wonders how many more will die before it’s over. He wonders—for just a moment—about the surviving recruits: are they unable to sleep, tonight? Are they crying for the friends they’ve lost or for the fragility of human life?

Hange tells him the names of the dead soldiers, and he writes them down. They both know that in the morning, he’ll have forgotten them again. Erwin Smith lives in the present. The fraction of him that still lives in the past… Well, it’s standing by his father’s grave—that part of him—and it always will be.

But Hange doesn’t know that. Erwin wonders what it is she sees when she looks at him. He’s staring at her when she pushes her goggles onto her forehead, when she looks down at him sitting straight-backed on a crate as if he’s still in training, afraid of being cracked across the back of his shoulders for bad posture.

“Are you all right, Erwin?” she asks.

He wonders how he can be anything else. He gives her a pained smile. He really is tired. Hange knows it’s not the usual kind: physical exhaustion or need of sleep. He could sleep for a thousand years and he’d still feel the same.

“I’m all right,” he tells her. That she bothers to ask means something to him. That she’s looking at him like she actually cares about his response: that means something, too.

For a moment, he almost imagines that he could kiss her—could pull her down onto his lap and feel her relax against him. It’s not a new thought: it’s one he’s discarded before. He hates that it keeps coming back while the names of the dead disappear.

“You’re sure?” she asks, concern pressing between her eyebrows.

A small part of him wants to laugh. Zoë Hange, who regularly forgets to bathe and eat because she’s so busy reaching her goal, feeling concern for Erwin Smith, who, in the pursuit of his own goal, has only grown _tired_.

Weary, he supposes, is a better word.

He won’t kiss her. It’s not right—and he knows it’s not fair. It’s a selfish thought, a desire born of his desire to be understood by someone, to be trusted as a human being and not a commanding officer.

Instead he takes her hand, holds it for a moment, brushes his fingers over hers. They both have strong hands, calloused and with blunted nails, chapped skin, too many lines against their palms. Her fingers curl around his reflexively as he lifts her hand to his mouth and breathes a kiss against the side of her thumb.

“Thank you,” he says, and he knows that she understands it’s for everything: for her dedication, her memory, her passion…and maybe most of all for just being there, for seeing him and everyone else as human even when he can hardly remember to do it himself.

He doesn’t look up at her until he feels her tug on his hand. Her eyes, clear and undistorted by the glass of her goggles, are strangely warm, and the lines in her forehead have smoothed. She kisses his hand, too, and afterward, holds it against her cheek. She stays that way for a long moment, expression gentler than he’s ever seen.

She smiles at him—something small and soft.

He knows it’s genuine.

“Erwin,” she says, “you’re not alone. You don’t have to be alone, and you sure as hell don’t have to _feel_ alone.” She lowers their joined hands, and then she lets him go. “All right?” she asks.

He returns her smile. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.”

Maybe there is more to it all—to what he feels for her, but he’ll never be able to say any of it.

He’s forgotten how.


End file.
